There is something wrong with the Government’s version of our stunning success in thwarting the planned terrorist attack on aircraft bound from Britain to the United States, bombings that would have “caused loss of life on an unprecedented scale”. We are told that, thanks to the brilliance of our anti-terrorist forces, we have avoided another 9/11. Apparently faced with a bombing attack on a number of transatlantic aircraft, “part of the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the Second World War” (our Home Secretary, John Reid’s, words), we have rounded up the “main players” just in time, and they are all in custody.
It is four years since President Bush declared a global war on terror so it is fair to ask: how is it going? Well, the first point to make is that it is not a war on terror anymore. One of Washington’s sneakier tactics is that if a crucial policy begins to lose public support, you don’t change the policy, you just change its name and carry on. So it is no longer the war on terror. It is the “global struggle against violent extremists”.
There are no tanks at Heathrow – yet. There is no ring of troops around London’s financial district – yet. But Britain is on a “heightened” state of alert as police at Paddington Green station continue to question terrorist suspects arrested at gunpoint in raids across the country earlier in the week.
Across the Atlantic, the Americans are on “orange” (the second highest) alert as the Homeland Security chief, Tom Ridge, said new intelligence suggested that al Qaeda planned car or truck bomb attacks on the Citicorp building, the New York Stock Exchange, and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank buildings in Washington. American banks in London could also be targets.
The furore about Australia’s intelligence community – its failures, tainted reports, politicisation, poor management and damaging disputes with its officers – is not unique. It is typical of what has been occuring in all Western intelligence services since 9/11 blasted them out of their complacent mind set.
Trained to cope with the major Cold War monster, the Soviet Union, they failed not only to identify the new threat but even to imagine what it might be. The collapse of communism (something which, incidentally, came as a complete surprise to every Western intelligence service) left them desperate to find ways of justifying their existence.
The Pentagon made it clear from the beginning of the war against Iraq that there would be no censorship. What it failed to say was that war correspondents might well find themselves in a situation similar to that in Korea in 1950. This was described by one American correspondent as the military saying: “You can write what you like – but if we don’t like it we’ll shoot you.” The figures in Iraq tell a terrible story. Fifteen media people dead, with two missing, presumed dead. If you consider how short the campaign was, Iraq will be notorious as the most dangerous war for journalists ever. This is bad enough. But – and here we tread on delicate ground – it is a fact that the largest single group of them appear to have been killed by the American military.
Paul McGeough is a distinguished member of a fast-vanishing band of journalists, the roving foreign correspondent. Once upon a time, every newspaper had at least one. In the golden age, the ’60s and ’70s, some had four or five.
Few lasted long. The things they had seen, the drink, the corrupting influence of expense accounts and five-star hotels, the strain of a part-time marriage and the deadening feeling that history was circular and what they were writing about they had written before, pushed them into early retirement. The accountants, appalled at what they cost, made certain they were not replaced.
